Cue Card will not be heading to Aintree next month after being sidelined for the season after it was discovered he has suffered a minor stress fracture of the pelvis.

Trainer Colin Tizzard had already ruled his stable star out of the Cheltenham Festival, but hoping he may be able to make next month’s Crabbie’s Grand National meeting at Aintree.

The initial diagnosis was that he had pulled muscles, bit on further investigation the underlying problem was revealed.As a dual Festival winner – having claimed the Champion Bumper in 2010 and the Ryanair Chase last year – the eight-year-old was set to bid for Cheltenham Gold Cup glory at next week’s Festival.

He landed a fine success in the Betfair Chase at Haydock Park in November before finishing runner-up to Silviniaco Conti in the King George VI Chase at Kempton on Boxing Day.

But on his injury Tizzard said: “It’s only small. We sent him up to Newbury for a bone scan.

“We were getting nowhere. When we said he wasn’t going to run (at Cheltenham) we stopped riding him then. The week before that one day he’d be sound and the next he wasn’t.

“We said it must be muscle – the physio said it was muscle, the vet said it was muscle, so we assumed that’s what it was.

“It’s a good job we did what we did. If we had given him a spin on a good day, God knows what could have happened.

“It’s only a small fracture and the prognosis is a month in the box, then the walker and hack round for three weeks then he’ll go out in the field and we’ll have him back at the normal time for next season.

“It’s a gut wrencher really.

“You try to say it’s only a horse and there are worse things in life, but expectations were high for all of us. We’ve had some brilliant days with him and hopefully we can have a few more.”